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25 years since the Montreal Massacre

Daedalus685

Daedalus685

Golden Member
http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcom...er6-1989-massacre-at-ecole-polytechnique.html

It is 25 years today since the Montreal Massacre.

It remains just as important as then (especially on the internet...) to take a moment and think about what we can do to help alleviate the misogyny in our society that still very much exists at work, at school, and elsewhere.

It's not about gun control, its not about the murderer, it is about the 28 injured and 14 murdered women who dared enter a male dominated field and the violence many women still have to face in their lives today.

14 women, several of them at the top of their engineering class at one of Canada's finest schools, would be at the apex of their careers today if not for this tragedy targeted at them because they were female. How many of us know first hand the impact a great engineer or scientist can have on the world around them a quarter of a century into their careers?

My thoughts are with them today.
 
KLin said:
Possibility of death is a huge motivator.
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ftfy

Someone in a confined space shooting people is a pretty good reason to do something. At that point, you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Either that, or call the cops. I'm sure that works too...
 
To believe that when instructed to leave a room at gun point you would stand up to the soon to be shooter any more than any of these people did means you are either a trained soldier/cop or vastly naive as to how human beings actually work under stress of imminent death.

It is easy to say the students should have been heroes but we really can't expect the average person to respond with heroism in that sort of situation.

How many people do you really think will choose heroic death over likely survival?

That is of course besides the point, responding to the most egregious act of violence against women in Canadian history with "The men should have done something more to help" is hilariously obtuse and only enforces the issues that are still very present in our society.

The only man who should have acted differently was the one shooting. Mind you this event did greatly change the way law enforcement handles these things in Canada.
 
Daedalus685 said:
To believe that when instructed to leave a room at gun point you would stand up to the soon to be shooter any more than any of these people did means you are either a trained soldier/cop or vastly naive as to how human beings actually work under stress of imminent death.

It is easy to say the students should have been heroes but we really can't expect the average person to respond with heroism in that sort of situation.

How many people do you really think will choose heroic death over likely survival?

That is of course besides the point, responding to the most egregious act of violence against women in Canadian history with "The men should have done something more to help" is hilariously obtuse and only enforces the issues that are still very present in our society.

The only man who should have acted differently was the one shooting. Mind you this event did greatly change the way law enforcement handles these things in Canada.
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You sound like one of those spineless Canadians. To wit:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate—an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history.
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That quote was from a Canadian newspaper reporter. Maybe if you understood the full level of cowardice shown by those 50 men, you'd understand the situation better.

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
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Their inactions are simply unfathomable to me.
 
Ruptga said:
And they will remain so until you find yourself in that situation. Until then, kindly shut the hell up and save your judgements for things you aren't ignorant about.
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You don't have to be in every situation to know how you'd react. You'd have to be some sort of an slackjawed idiot to even say that.

If someone attacked my kid, I know how I'd react. If a woman was being raped, I know how I'd react. If I saw a child get molested, I know how I'd react.

If you could stand there while you witnessed helpless women get massacred and couldn't even bother to grab the guy as he walked passed you in the hallway, then you're a coward of the highest order.

Kathy Shaidle said:
When we say “we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances”, we make cowardice the default position.
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Whatever you say, cowboy. I'm not impressed by your dick waving, and I doubt many people with triple-digit IQs are either. All I'm saying is that I don't know what I'd do, because I'm not a roid-rager with a chip on my shoulder and a death wish, but I'm not a wuss either. There are times to act, and there are times to just not get yourself killed, the difference is in the circumstances. Furthermore, unless you have ever been in a truly life and death situation you have no business talking trash about anyone that has been. Those situations can't be solved from an armchair; the best you can say is what you like to think you would do if you were tested the same way. Pretending that you have all the answers for every situation is a sure sign of a slackjawed idiot.
 
madoka said:
You don't have to be in every situation to know how you'd react. You'd have to be some sort of an slackjawed idiot to even say that.

If someone attacked my kid, I know how I'd react. If a woman was being raped, I know how I'd react. If I saw a child get molested, I know how I'd react.

If you could stand there while you witnessed helpless women get massacred and couldn't even bother to grab the guy as he walked passed you in the hallway, then you're a coward of the highest order.
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What makes the women any more helpless than the men?

Can you not see how re-framing such an act of violence against women into "the men should have manned up" is counter productive and insultingly sexist?

Certainly it would have been been an improvement if someone stepped up and did something and perhaps fewer lives could have been lost, but who am I to demand that someone die to appease my principles? Is it any less terrible if 13 women and one man died? That changes nothing about how this act targeted women for doing nothing other than participate in a male dominated field.

The whole point of this being a national day of remembrance in Canada is to remind us that while this sort of act is exceedingly rare, the attitudes that helped lead to it of 'men do men things and women do women things' still exist. Thankfully these attitudes are almost never so warped and deranged, but violence against women perpetrated by men is still a huge issue in our society.

Of all days of the year, today should be the least about "what the men could have done to help".
 
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I almost forgot, that Lepine guy sounds a lot like a Gamergater. A lot of the insane ideas he latched onto are still alive and well today.
 
Ruptga said:
Whatever you say, cowboy. I'm not impressed by your dick waving, and I doubt many people with triple-digit IQs are either. All I'm saying is that I don't know what I'd do, because I'm not a roid-rager with a chip on my shoulder and a death wish, but I'm not a wuss either. There are times to act, and there are times to just not get yourself killed, the difference is in the circumstances. Furthermore, unless you have ever been in a truly life and death situation you have no business talking trash about anyone that has been. Those situations can't be solved from an armchair; the best you can say is what you like to think you would do if you were tested the same way. Pretending that you have all the answers for every situation is a sure sign of a slackjawed idiot.
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It's hard to imagine how much of a chickenshit you'd have to be to walk out of that classroom, wait quietly as you hear the screams of nine of your female classmates as he methodically shot them one by one, and then hang your head low with 49 other men as the killer walked by in the hallway on his way to killing eight more women in the building.

I'd like to think that when I rushed that shooter at least some of the other 49 men there would join in, but if they were all like you, I guess I would be dying in vain.

But then risking your life would have meant that you might not be able to waste away your life fapping to free porn while making useless comments to other useless people on anonymous forums right?
 
Daedalus685 said:
What makes the women any more helpless than the men?
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Seriously, you're asking why? Have you been so brainwashed and emasculated that you can't tell why men are physically better equipped to stop the shooter?

Daedalus685 said:
Certainly it would have been been an improvement if someone stepped up and did something and perhaps fewer lives could have been lost, but who am I to demand that someone die to appease my principles? Is it any less terrible if 13 women and one man died? That changes nothing about how this act targeted women for doing nothing other than participate in a male dominated field.
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The Canadian reporter got it right. At no other point in human history did 50 young, able bodied men give up the women that they all knew to one man. I was shocked that not one of the 50 guys decided to rush him, especially when he was in the hallway on his way to shoot even more victims, but I'm so ashamed of the responses I see here that I'm embarrassed for you.
 
I just hope that when I grow up I can be half the badass you think you are. For now I'll just have to content myself with possessing basic skills in reading comprehension and rationality.

OP just report his dumb ass and be done with it already. He is deliberately taking this thread in a direction you asked us not to in the OP, that's textbook threadcrapping.
 
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madoka said:
It's hard to imagine how much of a chickenshit you'd have to be to walk out of that classroom, wait quietly as you hear the screams of nine of your female classmates as he methodically shot them one by one, and then hang your head low with 49 other men as the killer walked by in the hallway on his way to killing eight more women in the building.

I'd like to think that when I rushed that shooter at least some of the other 49 men there would join in, but if they were all like you, I guess I would be dying in vain.

But then risking your life would have meant that you might not be able to waste away your life fapping to free porn while making useless comments to other useless people on anonymous forums right?
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watch-out-we-got-a-badass-over-here-meme.png
 
Ruptga said:
I just hope that when I grow up I can be half the badass you think you are. For now I'll just have to content myself with possessing basic skills in reading comprehension and rationality.

OP just report his dumb ass and be done with it already. He is deliberately taking this thread in a direction you asked us not to in the OP, that's textbook threadcrapping.
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You realize that immediately following the massacre, those men were asked why they didn't do anything right? A similar criticism was made about the SWAT team that waited outside. It's all part of the tragedy that many felt was at least partially preventable. Many of those 50 men later said that they regretted their lack of action. But if you want to ignore that part of the story because you've lost the argument and want to be a weenie about it, then go ahead.
 
madoka said:
Seriously, you're asking why? Have you been so brainwashed and emasculated that you can't tell why men are physically better equipped to stop the shooter?



The Canadian reporter got it right. At no other point in human history did 50 young, able bodied men give up the women that they all knew to one man. I was shocked that not one of the 50 guys decided to rush him, especially when he was in the hallway on his way to shoot even more victims, but I'm so ashamed of the responses I see here that I'm embarrassed for you.
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Maybe it's more of an engineer/techie kind of thing
You see a lot of it here including false bravado
 
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madoka said:
You don't have to be in every situation to know how you'd react. You'd have to be some sort of an slackjawed idiot to even say that.

If someone attacked my kid, I know how I'd react. If a woman was being raped, I know how I'd react. If I saw a child get molested, I know how I'd react.

If you could stand there while you witnessed helpless women get massacred and couldn't even bother to grab the guy as he walked passed you in the hallway, then you're a coward of the highest order.
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Nice armchair quarterbacking...If you'd done any studying whatsoever of how people act under duress (specifically, combat) you'd understand that even in the military, the ones who are pegged as the best soldiers are often the ones who crumple and fail under the stress of combat. No one know how they'll react under those circumstances until they happen.
 
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